High-contrast anisotropic edge enhancement free of shadow effect.

We propose a Bessel-like composite vortex filter to perform high-contrast and power-controlled anisotropic edge enhancement with shadow-effect-free and low background noise. The background noise, which is commonly found and strongly decreases the filtered image quality in previous anisotropic vortex filters, is effectively reduced by suppressing the side lobes of the system point spread function, thereby increasing the image edge contrast to 0.98. The shadow effect is totally eliminated by keeping the radial symmetry of the filtering process, which makes edges sharper and improves image resolution. By introducing a weighting factor between two opposite vortex filter components, the power of edge enhancement becomes controllable. Numerical simulations and experimental results prove that the proposed filter achieves higher-contrast edge enhancement for both phase-contrast and amplitude-contrast objects.